Iowa ACLU Challenges List of Non-Eligible Voters

(Des Moines, IA) -- The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Iowa, and national ACLU, are asking a federal judge to block a list obtained by the Iowa Secretary of State of more than 2,000 potential non-citizens who had either voted or are registered to vote.

"Since Secretary of State (Pate) like all of us, is now fully aware that the information that his challenge is based on is not fully current, and that many of these people are in fact naturalized United States Citizens," said Rita Bettis Austen, legal director of the ACLU of Iowa.

The suit requests that election officials be ordered to halt efforts to prevent those on the list from being allowed to vote. It also asks that citizens in the group be allowed to vote with a regular ballot. "There is simply no lawful basis to require these citizens to vote provisional ballots instead of regular ballots like all other citizen voters," Austen said.

The Iowa Secretary of State's office says it has been requesting access to information from the federal government to help verify the eligibility of Iowa voters and clarify uncertainty regarding the citizenship status of some self-reporting noncitizens.

"We're working off the only list available to us, unless the Department of Justice and Homeland Security give us the master list, this is the best we can do," said Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate during a press conference about election security this week.

"We're not stopping anyone from voting, they are still on the voter registration rolls," Pate said, "this is different than what you see in other states, where they remove these people. We are simply asking our poll workers to confirm their citizenship status because of the lag period in the records we have available to us right now."

Pate says the Des Moines field office of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has reviewed all 2,176 names provided, but that officials in Washington D.C., are preventing the results from being shared.